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My most costly purchases

My most costly purchases

Notice I didn’t say “most expensive” because I am listing the two purchases that cost me a greater proportion of my income at the time.
In 1970, my brother moved out taking his Pioneer receiver and Gerrard Turntable with him. I bought a Sansui receiver, a dual turntable and the smaller Advent speakers. For $400, plus tax, $425. I was in high school and minimum wage back then was about $1.50. That’s roughly 300 hours of work!!!!!!

Working evenings to pay for college I didn’t TV in the 1970s. I heard about “All in the Family”, “Roots” and many other shows but I got to see them only on holidays. In those days there was no cable, shows often did not rerun ALL their episodes, the networks often put their best shows on against each other, especially in sweep weeks and you had to choose one or the other..

So in 1978 or so, I bought my first VCR a Sony Betamax for about $700!!!! Tapes were $20 then too, perhaps an equivalent of $50 in today’s currency. I used to tape St Elsewhere and my girlfriend would come over and watch it with me.

I bring all this up because I just saw that St Elsewhere is now on HULU. In fact everything I ever wanted to watch is now or Hulu. Or Netflix. Or Amazon. And what I miss is On Demand. My DVR records everything I ever want to see anyway.

I can watch these shows on a 110 projection screen, a 65 OLED, a 12 inch IPad, a 23 inch computer or a 7 inch telephone.

As for Beta, we used Beta SP decks at CNN. VERY good video quality even after a generation or two of editing to other tapes. We didn't have a recorder at my parent's house until the late '80s and it was VHS.

As for my costly purchases, I bought what was supposed to be an "Audiophile Universal" Pioneer Elite disc spinner (CD, DVD, DVD-A, SACD) in the early 2000's for $1300. It wasn't long after that I heard about this Oppo player that was just about as good at audio and killed my player on benchmark DVD video tests and it was a fraction of the price that I paid.

Then, when Blu-ray rolled around the first player was $1000 which a better and faster player can now be had for $100.

Having the Pioneer LDS-2 Elite disc spinner for Laser Discs, which I loved, I did buy their Blu Ray player, which was not very good. On this site I learned about the Oppo. I moved my Pioneer upstairs for our smaller system, and but the Oppo in the big one. Wow, the Oppo was, and is incredible! My brother now has it, as I got the 4K players. Our "smaller system" now has an Oppo 203 and an LG 65 OLED TV. It's incredible! I am so sad that we lost Oppo!

Oppo discontinuing their Blu-ray production is still hard to believe. I first heard about them on the old Home Theater Spot. Back then they were making lower cost up-scaling DVD players that were slaying players that were 4X the money when it came to video tests.

I can't believe that Jerry didn't tell me they were closing up shop so I could have grabbed a 105 (for audio) when they move into 4K production.

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